Rogue (32 page)

“Holy shit,” she said, goose bumps firing up and down her arms. “The bathroom in the Juniors’ dorm. I was staring out the window. I saw a flash of silver right before I zonked out—it was right after they Amnesia’d me!”

“So you wouldn’t have remembered this!” Elysia added.

“Shh!” Lex hissed, even though the Lifeglass didn’t have sound.

Zara, despite her many flaws, had one major thing going for her: intelligence. Even at that moment, freshly strangled and probably hating Lex more than she ever had, she had the presence of mind to remember that as well: the Lifeglass had no sound. So she thought for a moment, ducked away from the window, then came back with a piece of paper—or whatever the equivalent was inside the Afterlife. It said:

I HATE YOU, LEX
.

Lex felt a stab of guilt. Zara let the piece of paper fall, but there was another behind it. And another.

BUT I LOVE IT HERE. THE AFTERLIFE IS BETTER THAN ADVERTISED. I DON’T WANT IT TO DISAPPEAR
.

SO I LOOKED FOR HELP. AND WHAT I FOUND WAS CORPP
.

Lex and Elysia both gasped. After Lex had accidentally Damned Corpp, he’d gone deep into the Void for good, not wanting to see the living anymore. It was just his way of dealing with death; he wanted to paint and explore the Afterlife, not get caught up in the past.

HE WASN’T HAPPY TO SEE ME, OBVIOUSLY. BUT HE TOLD ME SOMETHING THAT I THINK CAN HELP
.

WHEN YOU DAMNED CORPP, DRIGGS UNDAMNED HIM—OR SO WE ALL THOUGHT. BUT THAT’S NOT WHAT DRIGGS DID
.

Lex didn’t dare breathe. Neither did Elysia; they both watched, not blinking, not wanting to miss what came next.

Not that they could have. Zara held that last paper up longer than any of the others, emphatically pointing and even mouthing the words.

DRIGGS UNGRIMMED HIM
.

A choked noise sounded behind her. Lex whipped around to find Driggs standing there, looking at the words in the Lifeglass with just as much confusion and shock as the girls were feeling.

“What’s going on?” he asked, his voice shaky.

It took Lex a second or two to find her voice. “It’s Zara,” she told him. Bang and Ferbus were listening too now. “She left me a message that I hadn’t remembered, because the Juniors Amnesia’d us. She said . . .”

She didn’t need to tell him what Zara said. By the look on his face, he’d seen everything.

Driggs shook his head. “That can’t be true.”

“Except—” Elysia’s eyes widened. “Oh my God, that’s
it!
Why I felt so weird after you touched me, why I haven’t felt like myself ever since, why I couldn’t scythe! You—I—” She grabbed the edges of the coffee table. “I’m not a Grim anymore!”

Driggs’s eyes were darting around the floor. “But how could—I didn’t mean to—”

“But you did,” Grotton’s voice growled.

The Juniors screamed. Grotton floated through the doorway, leering at them.

“What are you doing here?” Lex said.

“Oh, I came for the decadent atmosphere,” he said, sniffing his nose at the dusty lights. “But I stay for the adolescent screeching.”

Lex wanted to grab him around the throat. “
How
are you here? I thought you were shackled to the Wrong—oh,” she said, remembering. “You can project yourself.”

“Precisely.” He glanced at Zara, frozen in the Lifeglass. “So you’ve figured it out, then?”

“Figured what out?” Lex asked. “If anything, we’re more confused than we were before!”

“Why?” he replied. “The answer’s right there in front of you.”

“But what does Driggs have to do with anything?” she shot back. “You said it yourself—I’m the Last!”

His smile grew and grew, Cheshire cat–like.

“I wasn’t talking to
you
, love.”

All eyes in the room flew to Driggs.

“Okay,” Driggs said, holding his hands out in front of him. “Let’s all just hold the goddamned phone here. I
can’t
be the Last.” He pointed at Lex. “You’re the only second-generation Grim in existence! You’re the one Damning and ghosting and obliterating the Afterlife! No offense.”

“None taken.“ the o”

“I just—how could it be
me?
”

“Good question,” said Grotton, floating to Driggs’s side and whispering in his ear. “It’s a pity Mort’s stepped out. He’s the one who brought you to the Grimsphere in the first place, isn’t he? And at such an early age, too. Strange of him to make an exception like that, hmm?”

Something cracked in Driggs’s face. “He knew?”

When no one offered an answer to that, Driggs sat down on the floor, too shaken to remain standing. “This still makes no sense,” he told the carpet. “I’m not a second-generation anything. I’m nothing like you two,” he said, gesturing at Lex and Grotton. “I’m not exceptional in any way at all. So why me?”

“
Because
you’re not exceptional!” Lex blurted. She gave him a sympathetic look. “I mean, you are to me. But—what did Uncle Mort say back in his basement when we were looking at that rookie radar machine—”

“What, that I was a really rotten Grim when I first came to Croak?” Driggs said. “Way to kick me when I’m down, Lex.”

“But that’s my point. Maybe you weren’t supposed to ever become a Grim at all!”

He frowned, but didn’t say anything.

She joined him on the floor and tried to catch his gaze. “Think about it, Driggs. Did you turn delinquent just before you became a Grim, like the rest of us?”

“Of course I did, you know that! Shoplifted, got into fights—”

“But did you do all that stuff because you couldn’t help it, because you were strangely compelled to do so? Or were you acting out because of your parents?”

“I . . .” He looked even more confused. “I don’t know. I was so young.”

“Exactly.” She looked up at the other Juniors. “The rest of us didn’t go bad until a couple years before coming here—when we were around fourteen. Which means that when you came to Croak, you couldn’t possibly have turned yet. Uncle Mort must have picked you—”

“Before I even showed any signs of being a Grim,” Driggs finished.

“So what does that mean?” Ferbus piped up, trying desperately to keep up with this conversation. “You were never supposed to be a Grim at all?”

“Maybe not.” Heads swiveled to the front door, where Uncle Mort had silently appeared. “Or maybe so,” he added. “Never did figure that part out.”

He walked in, looking very tired as Driggs stared at him. “I was the one sent to Kill your parents,” he confessed. “I still did shifts back then, before my mayoral duties became too time-consuming. I saw you there, standing over them, and I—” He shook his head. “I don’t know. I saw something in you. You hadn’t shown up on my radar, and you hadn’t gone delinquent, but I just had a feeling that you belonged with us.”

“Hey!” Elysia said. “Maybe that’s why you can unGrim, Driggs! Because you’re the only Grim who’s secretly good, unlike the rest of us evil death folk.”

“But I
can’t
unGrim,” Driggs said, throwing Uncle Mort a desperate look. “Can I?”

Uncle Mort sat down on the couch next to Ferbus. “I don’t know,” he said, scratching his scar. “The mounting evidence is hard to ignore.”

“So if Driggs can unGrim,” Lex slowly started, “then he can do what he did not only to Elysia and Corpp, but to the entire Grimsphere population. Remove all traces of our powers from the world. If he gets his body back, he can essentially . . . destroy the Grimsphere.”

It seemed that all the air rushed out of everyone’s lungs at the same time. “Wow,” said Elysia. “That’s a pretty big deal.”

“No. It’s batshit
crazy
,” Ferbu/em of everyos said, looking at Uncle Mort. “Right? Tell them that’s batshit.”

But Uncle Mort was thinking. “It could work. If what Bang read from the Wrong Book pages is true, if the world is capable of going back to the way it was before Grotton came along”— a sharp growl from Grotton confirmed this theory—“then erasing all Grim powers would certainly ensure that no one could commit any violations ever again.”

Grotton looked shaken, upset that they’d discovered his secret: that he’d created the Grimsphere, that he’d so severely disrupted the natural order of things.

“So that’s your plan, then?” he sneered, fading. “Norwood will be most displeased to hear it.
”

He disappeared.

The Juniors were still reeling. “But—” Ferbus sputtered. “Being Grims is what we do. It’s who we
are
. How can we just give it up like that?”

Lex couldn’t imagine giving it up, but it was hard to argue with Uncle Mort’s logic. “Well,” he said, “I guess it comes down to the question of what’s more important—maintaining the Grimsphere and its cushy way of life, or ensuring the safety of the Afterlife for yourselves and for generations to come?”

Elysia shrugged. “Maybe sometimes you have to topple a secret empire that’s been around for centuries in order to save one that’s been around forever.”

“Some
times?
” Ferbus asked incredulously. “When exactly has this happened before?”

Uncle Mort ignored him. “This could work,” he said, the wheels turning. “Of course, it’s all contingent on the reset, and whether Driggs has enough human in him to become permanently solid again.”

“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” said Ferbus, swinging his stump. “Are we seriously considering this bonanza of insanity? Look, it’s not that I don’t
want
to give up my job and lifestyle and pretty much everything on this earth that I care about, but what gives us the authority to make a decision like this? How can the dissolution of a society be green-lit and carried out by a bunch of ragtag rebel teenagers and their—no offense, Mort—deranged leader? Shouldn’t the rest of the population have some sort of say in this? Before we so rashly take away their entire way of life?”

“We’ve already been given the green light,” Elysia argued. “By, if y
ou’ll recall, the
president
. All the mayors of the world, too—they wouldn’t have sealed the portals if they didn’t believe in the cause.”

“But none of them planned for it to go this far,” Ferbus argued back. “We’d be pulling the rug out from under thousands of people. Robbing them of their livelihoods. And they won’t know what to do with themselves—it’ll be total anarchy. Most of them never went to college or learned a trade; they’ll have to start their lives all over again. It’ll be just like Ayjay, multiplied across an entire society!”

“But it would be for the best,” Lex said quietly. When they all stared at her, since this was the last thing anyone ever expected to come out of Lex’s mouth, she shrugged. “Humans never should have been entrusted with this responsibility in the first place, as flawed and vulnerable to corruption as they are.” She looked down. “As I was.”

Driggs was shaking his head, unable to comprehend the scale of what they were discussing, and him the lynchpin of all of it. Finally he looked at Uncle Mort. “What do you think?”

Uncle Mort was quiet.

“I think,” he eventually said, “we Grims have had one hell of a run.”

“Ready, Lex?” Uncle Mort asked a couple of hours later. The second-to-last dot, on the Brazil">

It was time to go back to Croak.

Uncle Mort packed up his bag while Ayjay watched from the hallway, his arms crossed. Elysia and Ferbus were already waiting in the backyard with Driggs. Bang sat on the couch, still sullen—but ever since Broomie had told her that Pip was all right, she’d allowed a little bit more of her face to peek out from behind her hair.

Lex nodded. “Yeah, I’m ready.”

“Good.” He reached into his bag, pulled out a vial of Amnesia, and started walking toward Ayjay. “One last order of business, and we’ll be on our way.”

Lex tensed. She thought she’d reached a good, sane place: she’d spent a wonderful night with Driggs, she was onboard with this nutzoid plan of theirs, and she was ready for the next step. But the moment she spotted that vial of Amnesia, something in her snapped.

“Don’t!”
She grabbed Uncle Mort’s elbow, yanking him back, and marched toward Ayjay.

Bang’s eyes widened.

“I lied,” Lex told Ayjay. She could sense Uncle Mort fuming behind her, but she didn’t care. “When you asked me if I knew you. I
did
know you. We all did. We were your friends—we lived together, worked together—you even had a girlfriend. That’s how you lost your eye, protecting her. You were a part of something special, and there were people in your life who cared about you. You can’t go back to that life—actually, if we do this right today, none of us can go back—but just remember all that, okay? Remember it.”

Ayjay’s mouth was moving, but nothing came out. Lex turned around to face Uncle Mort. He was staring at her, his expression unreadable.

After a moment he shook his head, put the vial back in his bag, and walked up to Ayjay. “Thanks for your hospitality,” he said, shaking his hand. Without another word he turned around and walked out the back door.

Bang looked up at Lex, making eye contact for the first time since they’d left Necropolis.

Lex shrugged. “You wouldn’t want to forget Pip, would you?”

Bang smiled.

Lex helped her off the couch and joined the others in the backyard. Uncle Mort was examining Ferbus, who, considering that he’d been forced to come to terms with a lot of major changes in the past twenty-four hours, was doing relatively well. He’d even come around on the unGrimming thing, though it was hard to tell whether he actually agreed with it or had just caved under Elysia’s relentless badgering.